WordPress Won the Race
A couple weeks ago I was in Indianapolis at a conference. I met a developer working for a web agency and asked if they used WordPress. With disdain he quickly replied:
WordPress is unpleasant to work with and came quickly become a mess and a nightmare to maintain. We avoid WordPress like the pest. Instead we have built our own CMS.
Its not the first time I hear developers bashing WordPress. Being such an extensible platform, its true that a developer can make a mess of it. However by following best practices, using a good theme and limiting the number of plugins, you can keep everything under control.
Ultimately though, I kindly reminded him that 25% of web sites on the web are powered by WordPress. If you’re a web agency, WordPress is your primary competition. You should understand and respect that. In fact, you should be leveraging WordPress yourself. Why reinvent the wheel? The plugin and theming capabilities are awesome. Its easy to build upon WordPress to provide your customers with that wow factor.
Today, I thought I would revisit statistics on WordPress usage. Seems numbers are higher than I thought.
According to Web Technology Surveys, 31.9% of the top 10 million Alexa ranked websites in the world are powered by WordPress. The survey also mentions that 46.2% of those top 10 million do not use any CMS. Accounting for that we see that WordPress has 59.3% of the CMS market share.
Looking at the past 8 years, we see that Joomla and Drupal market share have shrunk by half. We see that WordPress climbed from 50% to 60% market share. The growth from other CMS we do see is in services like Shopify (e-commerce) and Squarespace/Wix (drag and drop website builders). They are however, still marginal compared to WordPress.
When it comes to developer mind share, its always worthwhile turning to Stack Overflow Trends.
Since 2017 over 1% of questions asked on Stack Overflow are about WordPress. We have seen a dramatic increase over the past 10 years. We also see that Joomla and Drupal trends have gone downwards. WordPress clearly fronts the pack by a long mile.
Knowing that nowadays websites have become commodities, and that WordPress won the game, why would a developer choose something else to build a long lasting website for their client?
